BEFORE: The voice of Cindy Robinson carries over from "The First Purge", she does all the "Emergency Broadcast" announcements that signal the start and the end of the Purge. I know, this is keeping the chain alive by the thinnest of margins, but I've gotta do what I've gotta do to make sure the circle remains unbroken.
The debate rages - is "The Purge" just a silly, meaningless horror film, or should it be regarded as an impossibly prescient bellwether of where our country may be headed? That's exactly what I'm here to find out...
THE PLOT: A wealthy family is held hostage for harboring the target of a murderous syndicate during The Purge, a 12-hour period in which any and all crime is legal.
AFTER: Now I'm going to wonder if I messed up by watching "The First Purge" first, because here I am at the first "Purge" film, and storywise, I'm starting with too great of an advantage. The intrepid movie-viewers who watched this one during initial release had to start from scratch, and figure out what was happening and WHY it was happening as they went along, and maybe that's the way it should be. Figuring out the game is PART of the game.
Perhaps it's a bit like "Star Wars", as people sometimes ask me about showing that series to their kids, and they're wondering if they should start with Episode 1 or Episode 4. Well, it depends, like how smart are your kids? I don't say that, instead I usually say "How old are your kids?", which is essentially the same question. If they're really young, you may want to start with Episode 1, because maybe they'll identify with young Anakin and also, all the film's secrets will progress chronologically and be revealed in order, but then by the time they get to "A New Hope" and "The Empire Strikes Back" they'll already know Luke and Leia are twins and who Yoda is, so a lot of the mystery will be gone. If they're a little older, it makes more sense to start with Episodes 4-6 and then go back to Episodes 1-3, and the secrets of the story will be revealed they way they were to the original fans. (Another school of thought says to skip Episode 1 entirely and start with #2, but it's your call.)
So I go into "The Purge" knowing its biggest secret, which is that it was started by the haves to get rid of some of the have-nots, however that very point is also debated at the end of the original film. Naturally if you survive the Purge, there are more resources to go around, some of the undesirables are no longer with us, and there's a bigger piece of the pie for the lucky ones who are left. And then of course the politicians of the New Founding Fathers party will declare the event a success, and ride that wave of prosperity to re-election. However, anybody who lost somebody they care about might start to swing the other way, and question what the point of the Purge was in the end. And for those who died during the annual Purge, I guess they can't weigh in on the topic any more, so there you go, less dissension in the ranks.
We're thrown into Purge night a few years in, where people want to show their support for the idea by placing blue flowers outside their houses, which is a bit like giving out candy on Halloween not because you love the holiday, but just so nobody covers your car in soap and your house in toilet paper. Placing the flowers means that the gangs are less likely to target your house, I guess - because you're showing that you buy into the systemic belief that if we could all just have one night each year to kill whomever we want, then we'll be model citizens for the other 364. Does it even work that way, though? What about the people who develop a taste for killing, or come to depend on it to solve all their problems, and then find that they JUST can't wait for the date to come around again? But then there's that 1% unemployment figure, and the fact that it DOES seem to be working, crime is way down all over the country, except for "cheat day", and if the government says that's not a crime, then it's not a crime. "Oh, I don't eat meat, except for on Saturday." "I don't eat sweets, except for at 2 am when nobody's watching..." Come on, you're only fooling yourself.
We follow a family of "haves", a guy who got rich after taking advantage of the market's needs and selling high-tech, purge-proof security systems to every house in the neighborhood. Guns and security systems seem to be the biggest growth industries in this new world. But everyone in the neighborhood secretly hates this family, so we learn, which is a plot point that could be important later. And the fact that James Sandin has forbid his daughter from seeing her boyfriend, well then I guess all is not well, there's some trouble in paradise, isn't there? And then on Purge Night, there's just one rule - stay inside with the security system on and the metal gates down. But young Charlie Sandin sees a bloodied black man, running from an unseen (presumably white) gang, and he opens the gate to let this man in. It's fine, I'm sure there won't be any repercussions from this noble (?) act...
You know you're in a weird place when the message of a film seems to be: "Don't help someone in need, or bad things will happen to you and your family..." but that's where we find ourselves, isn't it? Are we supposed to follow this advice in the future, or instead should we be on our guards to make sure the system that forces this attitude never comes into being? I'm just wondering now if this whole movie is a metaphor for something else, like it couldn't have been the Trump Presidency or the pandemic lockdown or Black Lives Matter, so what was it? The difficulty of securing peace in the Middle East? Doomsday preppers or the looming class war? Gun violence or the futility of gun control laws? The irony of a stock market boom after some kind of disaster event?
NITPICK POINT: OK, so every house on the block has a neat, anti-purge security system to keep the freaks out. But arson is legal during the Purge, right? So what's to prevent the gangs from just burning every house on the block, to make the people inside evacuate? If they stay in their panic rooms, they could die from the smoke inhalation or get cooked to death. Oh, right, the blue flowers - I'm sure a roving gang of murderers is going to respect a vase full of blue flowers. There are no emergency services until 7 am, and that includes fire trucks, just saying.
NITPICK POINT #2: The whole neighborhood hates the Sandins because they all paid for security systems, which (for the most part) do appear to be working. Why the hate, then? Do you hate the man in town who sold everybody a car and got rich from that? Maybe if the cars don't work well, they'd have a legit beef, but this is capitalism, who cares how somebody got their money? You know what, on Purge night if everything is legal, then maybe hacking the security systems of those ungrateful neighbors and switching them off is legal, too. They can't hold the Sandins responsible for getting rich if they also depend on those security systems for their own safety.
Also starring Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Tesla"), Lena Headey (last seen in "The Gathering Storm"), Max Burkholder (last seen in "Friends with Money"), Adelaide Kane (last seen in "Cosmic Sin"), Edwin Hodge (last seen in "The Tomorrow War"), Rhys Wakefield, Tony Oller, Arija Bareikis (last seen in "No Reservations"), Tom Yi (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Chris Mulkey (last seen in "Message from the King"), Tisha French, Dana Bunch, Peter Gvozdas, John Weselcouch, Alicia Vela-Bailey, David Basila, Nathan Clarkson, Mickey Facchinello, Boima Blake, Jesse Jacobs, Emma Jonnz (last seen in "Free Guy"), Aaron Kuban, Chester Lockhart, Tyler Osterkamp, Karen Strassman, R.J. Wolfe
RATING: 5 out of 10 sharpened machetes
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